Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  They carried me from the boarding house. I remember their military-style boots, the smell of polish and a sick headache, and they wouldn’t let me rise from the floor of the van until I was bundled out beneath a blanket and into a concrete barracks building of the sort we threw up everywhere during the war. There, I was searched, then dragged along a corridor of empty cells to this one, with its high window and tiny tent of blue. I guess that was a week ago and that they’re holding me at the old camp on Ham Common where we interrogated spies during the war. My guards have no conversation. They bring me rations and take my bucket away. I have blankets and a camp bed, a table that folds down from the wall, a stool, and a copy of the Bible, which I have almost finished. Like Hess in Spandau I am their only prisoner. The concrete weeps, there are holes in the perimeter wire, and my food comes in a can from somewhere outside the facility and is always cold.

  Phillpotts was my first visitor. ‘I’m fire-fighting, Vaughan. I don’t have to be gentle!’ He wanted the copies I’d made of the files and he knew he wasn’t going to coax the names of the recipients from me. People who say torture doesn’t work are talking nonsense. But if you throw a prisoner to the goons you really can’t be squeamish. Trust them to do it their way. I lost a tooth on my first day and might have lost some more but for Phillpotts, who called them off before they could really get going.

  Lecky was my next visitor. ‘Look, old boy,’ he said, ‘did you, or didn’t you?’

  ‘Did I do what?’

  ‘Give the damn file to the Russians?’

  ‘The one that proves the CIA is plotting a coup? No, Terence, I didn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, ‘but we want them all back. How many copies did you make?’

  That was five days ago and no one else on the outside has come near me since. The guards are under orders not to speak to me. Yesterday I was permitted to pace a square between the buildings. For twenty minutes the tent of blue was a bloody glorious pavilion. I have too much idle time and I’ve started to dream. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m asleep or awake. I dream of you, Elsa. Behold, you are beautiful, my love, it says in the Song of Solomon; your eyes are doves.

  ‘You’re not f-f-famous, I’m afraid.’ Wright reaches into his jacket for one, two, three, four films and places them on the pine table in front of me. ‘No one is agitating for your release.’

  We’re alone together in the ‘interview’ room where I lost a tooth, and after three weeks’ solitary I’m genuinely pleased to see him. The strange thing is, he seems to feel the same way. He greeted me with a lop-sided smile, and commented regretfully on mine. ‘Quite unnecessary to use violence,’ he says. ‘I c-can’t imagine what Phillpotts was thinking. But Six has passed you on to us now.’

  Exclusive property of MI5 and Peter Wright. I expect the room is wired and members of my FLUENCY family are on site, listening for slips in my story. It feels very personal already because the table is so narrow our feet keep touching. I can see a patch of grey stubble he missed with the razor this morning, and he will certainly be able to smell a noxious odour from me after nearly a month without bath. I look frightful but he wants me like that. Every small advantage counts. Why? Because interrogation is a battle of wills, and he knows an insider like me will see the punches coming.

  ‘The Mirror chap, W-Watkins?’ He shakes his head. ‘Your friend W-Watkins’s tax affairs are a terrible mess. He could go to prison. Well, in the circumstances, he was happy to help us.’ He picks up one of the films and rolls it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘And the other films? Dr-Driberg! That surprised me. Tom Driberg! Did you choose him because he was on good terms with Burgess? Doesn’t matter. A liar and a queer and a shit. But our shit. Our liar. We run Driberg.’

  I laugh. ‘Come on!’

  But he’s serious. In fact, he looks as smug as I’ve seen him. ‘T-Tom was selling intelligence to the Czechs, you see, and in return for our silence he agreed to pass us information on the L-L-Labour Party.’

  I put on a brave face – that’s how you play.

  ‘But you didn’t put all your faith in Driberg and Watkins, did you? How many copies are there?’

  ‘Are you going to let me see a lawyer?’

  ‘For your moment in court? To destroy the reputation of the Service? No.’

  ‘Save the Service!’ I bark at him. ‘You want to remove the prime minister. I didn’t just photograph the bloody papers, I read them too. We’re the servants, not the masters of the state.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ says Wright.

  ‘Did Dick enjoy reading his file?’

  That seems to touch a nerve. ‘You – you h-had time to shoot more films. Did you take them to your controller?’

  ‘My controller?’ I scoff. ‘I sent the information to the Mirror, remember?’

  ‘B-b-because it weakens the Service and drives a wedge between us and the Americans. You’re tr-trying to protect the network – protect ELLI.’

  ‘Vaughan, the KGB agent on the inside?’

  ‘Instructed to shut down the FLUENCY investigation.’

  ‘I see.’ I reach for his cigarettes. ‘Do you mind? The guards won’t let me.’ Wright nods and pushes his lighter across the table.

  ‘Where are the other films, H-Harry?’

  I say, ‘Oh, God, that’s good,’ and draw deeply on my cigarette. ‘I learned a word at Oxford – yes, that place – an Old English word. Selfæta. It means an animal that preys on its own kind – self-eater. That’s how I think of you, Peter.’

  Wright leaves me to stew for almost a week. The next time I see him he’s wearing fawn slacks and a hideous checked jacket that he must have bought in America. Everything in the interrogation room is as it was before, except for the table, which is new, and a couple of feet less intimate. And no pleasantries, no cigarettes, just ‘Where are the other copies, Vaughan?’ My silence will hurt people, he says, like the secretary who gave me the combination of the director general’s safe, and the policeman who was foolish enough to allow me into the building, and young Wylie who surrendered the key. Then he talks of sending me to America. ‘Jim thinks we should make you disappear,’ he says, ‘s-so you should think of your children.’

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘I do.’

  But we’re just dancing round each other. The fight proper begins when he takes a big fat file from his bag, the file I saw in the DG’s safe – my file. Ah, the devotion Evelyn has shown me: she is like an old and bitter lover. Without shame we begin with Harry Vaughan the boy in tackety boots, whose clothes were fine-dusted with coal every day except Sundays. Born to the chapel and the miners’ union and to the spirit of socialist revolution in a village the popular papers call ‘Little Moscow’.

  ‘You couldn’t leave the village, could you?’ he says. ‘Did you choose the VENONA code name JACK because it was your father’s name?’

  I deny it for the record.

  ‘He was a m-member of the Party. When did you join? Was it at Oxford?’

  I pretend to consider this a moment then say, ‘I’m going to give it to you on a plate, Peter.’

  He looks puzzled.

  ‘Yes, I joined the Party in Oxford.’

  He looks down at my file but not before I see the triumph in his eye. ‘Who r-r-recruited you?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you that.’

  ‘Was it Goronwy R-Rees?’

  ‘It was 1938. I left the following year when the Soviet Union struck a pact with the Nazis to enslave the people of Poland.’

  ‘What did you do for the Party?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He smiles. ‘You all say that.’

  I shrug.

  ‘R-Rees says B-Burgess recruited you, that he tried to warn you.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘But he was the one, wasn’t he?’

  There’s a patch of mould the colour of gangrene on the wall behind his right shoulder and I focus my gaze upon it. In my mind’s e
ye I see Rees in his leather slippers, gazing through the window of the ward at a barren garden. Yes, Rees is a coward, Driberg a liar, but they’re like flies in the FLUENCY web: so desperate to free themselves they’re prepared to entangle another. Salem to the Soviet Union, it’s the same. That’s how these witch-hunts work. I could hurt Rees, but to what purpose?

  ‘Did you know B-Burgess was a Soviet agent?’ says Wright.

  ‘I knew he was a Communist.’

  ‘Rees says you knew he was an agent, that you told him.’

  ‘That isn’t true. I didn’t need to tell him.’

  ‘And w-when you joined the Service you said nothing,’ he says contemptuously.

  ‘There is a saying, Peter: Gall pechod mawr ddyfod trwy ddrws bychan. A great sin can enter by a small door. It was the war and the Soviet Union was our ally, remember? There were more important things to worry about – and after the war I was posted to Vienna.’

  ‘And Philby? You knew he was a spy, too.’

  ‘Is that a question? I knew as much about him as you did, and a good deal less than Sir Dick White.’

  He looks at me sideways. ‘I d-don’t believe you left the Party.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’

  ‘You have fought us all the way.’

  ‘Because you are as big a liar as Burgess, only he knew he was a liar.’

  Three fruitless years of searching, and they are yet to discover an active agent. Wright is sure he’s found dozens, scores, and I am the latest. Proof? I searched his safe, he says, and I prevented him searching Hollis’s. I have protected ‘the Oxford Circle’ that isn’t a circle, and sheltered Mitchell, and now I’m trying to leak information that would ruin the Service. ‘We made a terrible m-mistake,’ he says. ‘We locked the chicken house with the f-fox inside.’

  ‘And the prime minister? Just how far are you prepared to go? How far is Jim Angleton prepared to go?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  ‘I’m trying to save the Service,’ I say for the tape.

  ‘Where are they, Vaughan?’ He means the remaining copies of the files.

  ‘They’re ticking away.’

  He knows if they go off they’ll bring down the whole bloody FLUENCY edifice and finish Angleton once and for all. So, what now, Peter?

  53

  THE GORILLAS ARE back with their knuckle-dusters. They drag me from my cell in the early hours and prop me in a chair, and when I fall to the floor they bring me round with a bucket of water and prop me up again. I’m not brave and I’m no more capable of tolerating pain than the next man, but there are moments in every life when we find something surprising in ourselves, and this is one of those times. I don’t know their names; I don’t expect I’ll forget their eyes. One of them has a little scar above his lip, the other a lion rampant on a very hairy forearm. They are clipped and talk in clichés, like soldiers, and I guess they believe it’s their duty to give me a good hiding.

  ‘How many films? Who has the films?’ Over and over and over. For how long? I can’t tell. My body is screaming to me to spit it out through my teeth; my face hurts so much they’ve made it easier to say nothing. But it isn’t the Lefortovo in Moscow and these two are not KGB torturers. I guess it must be dawn when they take me back to my cell. One of the regular guards brings me warm water and a mug of sweet tea. A little while later – at least it seems so – he shakes me awake and offers me more tea and a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Five minutes, Vaughan,’ he says. ‘Then you’re back in.’

  I know he’s lying when I see Wright sitting at the table. He won’t witness any physical ‘persuasion’ because it has to be deniable.

  ‘S-s-s-sit,’ he says, and I laugh.

  ‘Shit, did you say? Yes, it is!’

  One should not mock the afflicted except in exceptional circumstances. ‘How do I look?’ I grip the edge of the table and lower myself on to the seat I so recently occupied for a beating. ‘My wife used to think I looked like Dirk Bogarde.’ I wince and touch my lip for his benefit. ‘Your thugs have turned me into … into Ernest Borgnine.’

  ‘I d-don’t expect she cares what you l-look like, Vaughan.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’re her best friend.’

  ‘Oh, we get on well enough.’ He reaches into the pocket of his appalling jacket and slides a photograph across the table. ‘R-recognise this?’

  ‘Of course. Vienna, ’forty-eight.’ It’s the picture of the two of us in the snow that I used to keep in a drawer at home.

  ‘L-l-let’s go back to that time, shall we?’

  I pick up the photograph and concentrate on the memories. Even with a split lip and a bruised face, and with Wright sitting across from me, it brings a lump to my throat.

  ‘SUBALTERN wasn’t your operation, but you’d met Miss Spears in London … You st-started to see her, and that gave you access to the intelligence from the SUBALTERN operation.’

  I put the photo down and stare. ‘That’s nasty.’

  ‘Was Otto your controller?’

  ‘Otto was probably dead.’

  ‘How do you know he’s dead?’

  ‘I don’t know he’s dead.’

  ‘You told the agent you met in Vienna that Otto was dead.’ Wright turns the pages of his notepad. ‘In the garden of the Belvedere Palace two years ago – October.’

  ‘I merely presumed that to be the case.’ Leaning forward a little I prod his notebook with my forefinger. ‘It should be there. Anthony Blunt said Otto was called back to Moscow during the purges. What do you think happened to him?’

  ‘You said you knew he was dead.’

  ‘No, Peter,’ I say, as if correcting a child. ‘Evelyn?’ I know she’s listening somewhere. ‘Evelyn, cariad,’ I shout, ‘check the CIA transcript of the meeting, will you?’

  Wright’s face twitches with irritation. ‘It d-d-doesn’t matter. Your w-w-wife says you arranged a transfer to SUBALTERN, even though she didn’t want you to.’

  ‘She thought it was a mistake for us to work together. I thought she was taking too many risks. It was our biggest operation, and I wanted to be part of it.’

  ‘She remembers it differently.’ He glances at his notebook. ‘“Harry was a drag on the operation.”’

  I try to smile. Play wife against husband? ROSA against JACK? I would do the same.

  ‘You don’t b-believe me?’

  ‘Peter, I don’t want to be rude but your record of telling the truth …’

  ‘Oh, I’ve spoken to her m-many times. Arthur and I thought we should have a word. Well, her n-name kept cropping up. Remember my visit to Dennis Pr-Proctor in the South of France? I went on to Berlin. We kept that from you, of course.’ He pauses to let this penetrate, then says, ‘Your wife, too,’ just to be sure.

  I try not to blink, may even manage a smile, but it grieves and hurts me more than the worst sort of pummelling from his thugs. O fy nuw. I don’t want to believe him but I do.

  ‘Your w-wife’s history … well, we have our suspicions,’ he says. ‘But she has co-operated with us – and she says you shared everything with her.’

  ‘Not everything. I did tell her you were dangerously deluded, and you’d push your best friend in front of a train if Angleton wanted you to.’

  He ignores my jibes. ‘Any one of a d-d-dozen security breaches would be enough to send you to prison for a very long time.’

  ‘You want to take me to court?’ I laugh – and wince as the split opens in my lip.

  ‘Your wife says you hate the Service and she doesn’t understand why you won’t leave. But your KGB controller won’t let you.’

  ‘Is that a question?’

  ‘I told her you were – are a Communist – that you were recruited by Rees and Burgess, and that a former KGB officer remembers you in Vienna …’

  I snort derisively.

  ‘… that our defector says the Russians had a m-mole in the city, code name something like JACK—’

  ‘Something like! D
ear me.’

  ‘Your wife could see why we were suspicious. Things began to make sense – she says you hid a l-l-letter from her. Was it from your controller?’

  ‘From Rees.’

  ‘He denies it. There’s the matter of the visit to Anthony B-Blunt to tell him to shut up. The splints in your door. And your wife says you’re always checking to see if someone is following you. Oh, the l-l-lies you told her.’

  He smiles weakly and reaches for his cigarettes. ‘Yes, the lies. I had to tell her about the secretary in the DG’s office, and that you used her to steal s-s-secrets that could damage our country. Elsa was upset, naturally, and ready to help us prevent you running off to Moscow.’

  ‘I made it easy for you to find me. As good as wrote you an invitation.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the open ticket to B-Berlin?’ He turns a couple of pages of his notebook. ‘You purchased it under a false name last February. A place on the Cromwell Road called Golden Day Travel, under the name Morgan.’

  ‘Flying out to meet Elsa.’

  ‘She knew n-nothing about it.’

  ‘A surprise.’

  He looks at me sceptically, and with good reason. No word from her in days, talk of an Oxford circle, yes, I suspected her of being a spy. I don’t know if I’m right. I think it’s easier not to know.

  ‘Who’s ELLI?’ Wright leans forward, commanding my attention. ‘H-help us and we can talk about a deal.’

  I sigh. ‘A job in the Royal Household, like Sir Anthony? Look, it’s all in the paper I wrote for FJ. The mole was the acting head of a department of British counter-espionage or intelligence. Philby was acting head of Counter-espionage at MI6. The agent with the code name STANLEY in the VENONA signals and agent ELLI are one and the same man. Christ, the code names even sound the same. Who’s ELLI? Philby’s ELLI, and this – this witch-hunt in the Service is his crowning glory. I know you won’t change your mind, Peter, you’re not big enough. You and Jim will dig for ever, until there’s nothing useful left of the Service.’